given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.' (Gen. ix. 1—7.)

No one, I think, has ever doubted that this is a divine blessing upon the human race. The words are addressed to the representatives of it, who had just escaped from the waters of the flood. Now the two characteristics which were said to belong to man in his original creation, are said to belong to him here. The beasts, the birds, the fishes, are to fear him; he is made in the image of God. Neither of these titles can by possibility be limited to a time that was past. The dominion is especially assured to Noah and his sons; the law concerning the shedding of man's blood-a law, surely assuming that evil had existed and was likely to exist-rests on the other and more glorious distinction. There was a third part of the original charter which is renewed and strengthened. 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,' is a command given to those who had seen and experienced the wickedness of the old earth, with as much emphasis, with as large a benediction, as it was given on the day when the

heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

I apprehend that, even if we had not been told of that signal witness for God's order and against man's transgression, which is contained in the story of the Deluge, we should still have found nothing to surprise us in the blessing of Noah. The worst sinner who perished when the ark floated, had the right of dominion over the birds and the beasts and the fishes; though in consenting to obey his own inclination he had become their slave. He had a right to feel that the blessing, ‘increase and multiply,' was his; only through his uncleanness, and indifference to the duties of a father, he had made it into a curse. He had a right to believe that he had the likeness of God; only he had acquired the likeness of the serpent, which was sentenced to go on his belly, and eat dust. In every case the cause was the same, and the effect was the same. Each man would live in himself and to himself. He could not therefore be, in the real sense of the word, a man. He was wrapped up in his Adam nature.

no fellowship with his kind.

He could claim

Still there is something especially appropriate in this language to the inhabitants of a restored earth.

One cannot help feeling that, though it is in strictest accordance with all that has gone before, it has yet a wider scope-a higher promise. Compare it with the simple records of the garden life of Adam, and you perceive that you are entering upon a more advanced stage in human history.

I use the words because they are true, and because I think it is honouring God and his word to use them. I know very well that we shall hear of more and more complicated sins than we have heard of yet. But as I find a perfectly holy Being blessing the work of His hands; as I find the sacred historian regarding the world as His world, and man as under His government, I suppose it is not wrong but right for us to do the same, and to try, if we can, to understand what step it is that we have gained since the oppressors of the earth were destroyed, and it began its life anew.

One change has been often noticed, and has recently been turned into an argument against the old doctrine respecting capital punishment. Noah and his sons are told that, Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' But, by a still older decree, Cain was not to be slain for his crime. His mark was to be a warning that no man should lay hands on him. No doubt this is a remarkable contrast, whether it proves the point for the sake of which it is adduced or not. One sentence contemplates the offender as an individual wrong-doer, who has polluted the earth with his brother's blood, and against whom the earth cries for vengeance. Henceforth it will refuse to yield him its fruits. The other contemplates men as forming a society. The blood which is shed is the blood of some particular man; but it is a drop out of a common life. Whoso sheds it is guilty of an outrage upon a body politic: 'Of every man's brother will I require the life of

man.' Every man is his brother's keeper. Every man is shedding his own blood when he sheds his brother's blood. The word brother was addressed to a family; Noah and his sons must have interpreted it by their own experience. But the words 'every man's brother' expanded the principle of the family to a higher power. They declared that the race was a family; they intimated that society was to be built up on the recognition of an actual relationship among the different members of it. Henceforth this becomes

the great subject of the book.

In the previous records we had an intimation of cities built; of works in wood and iron; of the harp and the lyre. But all this premature civilization is found in the Cain family. It begins as so much of the world's so-called civilization has begun, with men breaking loose from family bonds, and forsaking the tillage of the earth, through the desire to sink the consciousness of some crime in intercourse with their fellows, in the works of their hands, in the delights of sense and sound. Such social progress soon terminates in a deeper barbarism, domestic life having been destroyed to make way for it. But no one can fancy that such an existence as is reported of the Seth family, that after so many years they begat children and after so many more they died, though suitable to the time, and though brightened by glimpses of a higher life-since it is reported of Enoch that he walked with God, and was not, for God took him,'-can be a type of that which is

intended for man. If it were if this mere long span of years were to be envied as the high privilege of an earlier and happier dispensationyou would find it hard to understand the records of all the greatest lawgivers, judges, kings, prophets, spoken of in Scripture; hardest of all to understand the story of His birth and death who dwelt on earth less than thirty-three years, and yet whom we hold to be the Priest, and Prophet, and King of the Universe. Our consciences justify the apparent indifference to chronology in Scripture, where the whole history of the patriarchs from Adam to Noah is summed up in fewer lines than those which describe the interview of Joseph with his brethren, or the one night in which the Israelites came out of Egypt.

And this is surely for the reason to which I have so often referred-In the image of God made He man.' The image of God may be dimly shadowed forth in length of years; it is actually seen in the righteousness, grace, truth, which constitute His eternal being. The exhibition of these to us must be the object, one would think, of a Divine revelation of a human history. And these, with all the qualities which are in conflict with them, come out through the joys and sorrows, the intercourse and the quarrels, of brothers and sisters, fathers and children, husbands and wives; through the fellowships and conflicts of nations, through laws and polities; through the discovery of the necessary connexion between crime and punishment; through efforts successful or disappointed, to redress wrong